Category: Email

As promised here’s the next step with which I will try and help you get organised – to make your email life a bit easier.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that complicated, nor should it be so easy that it’s not really helping you at all.

Like me, you are probably going to use your phone (smart or not) to see your emails periodically throughout the day. Then in the evening, or perhaps at lunchtime, you will pop onto your laptop or PC at home to read them properly and reply to any which weren’t urgent.

If you have than one email address, how are you accessing your accounts? Are you logging in to each one separately? You don’t need to. You can have all of your accounts come in to one and see all your messages at the same time. Sadly, there is more than one way to do this, but I will try to be as succinct as possible with my clarification as this is how I do it.

First off, please remember that I will always refer to Gmail accounts. I neither use nor like any of the HoYol (remember = Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL) ones as they are sooooo unprofessional – and although I know something about how they do things, I’m not going to compare them. Gmail/Googlemail can do it and that’s good enough for me and these little articles of mine. (That’s not to say you can’t do similar things with those accounts, so you may well get some ideas.)

As I have mentioned before, most of my accounts come through to a single Gmail account. I have email addresses for my several domains, as well as lots of Gmail ones. Three Gmail ones I keep separately – unlinked to one another – simply because that’s how I prefer to work. But even my oldest Gmail comes into what I now consider to be my main account. I even have a couple of Gmail accounts with similar names to my domains, simply because it’s easier to manage everything from one place. And that’s the key – doing as much as possible with a single login. You know, I can even reply from whichever account was written to automatically – or overwrite that with another account reply-to address if I want to. And sometimes I do.

I set them all up from my main account using settings – accounts and import – and once done, I just had to confirm in the other account that this is what I want to do. I could, but haven’t bothered, have each account’s messages labelled/filtered so that I can see what’s come from where. But because I have also set everything up so that I reply as if from the actual account to which the message was sent, that doesn’t seem so necessary. (I’ve just had a look and see that I have 13 accounts all coming into one, of which seven are from my domains.

What is really important, is for you to know what can be done – then you can decide whether you want to do it or not. It’s very much like computer software. All Word Processors do similar things, they just do them in subtly different ways. It’s funny too, because even switching between them, you seem to automatically work the way the program does as if by instinct. Very similar to driving different types of vehicle every day (I used to be a ‘bus and coach driver as well as motorbikes and plain ordinary push bikes!).

There’s also a way in which you can have mail ‘collected’ by Gmail and brought into one account. If you haven’t yet realised it, the method I have described above depends on you setting up a filter form ‘the other’ account, so that it ends up in your main one. But Gmail can use POP mail to collect messages – although I found that to be very slow in actual operation.

To finish this post I’d like to offer a little snippet of a tip.

Do you have a hobby or interest? Are you fed up with writing your name and address at the bottom of every message? Well, you can set up your own signature line or section, which can include a web address, short message, or such like. Here’s the one I currently have on my Archery email account:

Even if you already have an email account, there is nothing to stop you having another one – or two – or more. And they don’t have to be with the same ‘people’ – Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Google – in fact you’d be better off if they aren’t.

Let’s now work on the basis that you have a personal HoYol account (get it? – Hotmail/Yahoo/Aol) which you have been using for years. Is it ‘fit for purpose’?

What I mean is probably covered by several concepts – and the first one concerns the actual email address itself. Is it right for the way in which you are using it – business, social, or simply personal?

Let me give you an example. One of mine is lynndalf@…. Straightaway, that will tell you that a) I’m a great fan of Lord of the Rings, especially Gandalf, which leads to b) that I set it up at about the time I saw the first Peter Jackson LotR film, The Fellowship of The Ring – and fell in love with it! (And the year was…? Answers on a postcard please or see below – or click this http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Lord_of_the_Rings_film_trilogy ) It probably says a lot more about me, but we won’t go there just now.

If I plan to have any kind of professional credibility, I’m gonna have to use a different email address. Unless of course I want to do something closely linked to the LotR concept, in which case I’ll probably have considerable copyright issues. We won’t go there either.

I once came across a funny email address for someone – evilpig@… – now, I honestly don’t think that is a good advertisement for a therapist, do you? People who are looking for someone to help them, may well see the humour, but then again, they are usually depressed, so they may not appreciate it at the time and move on to someone who seems more professional.

Your email address is an advertisement for you, albeit a small one. With one exception, using any of the free HoYol addresses does not speak highly of you – Gmail/Googlemail is probably the only one you can get away with. Besides, it’s easier for you to use as well and is much less cluttered in it’s user interface.

Next post I will examine a bit more about how you can set up your Gmail account/s to help you in your business, professional life, or even if you have other interests and just plain want to have a separate account.

At time of writing, I have 63,704 messages totalling 1.79GB and I pay all of $5 a year for an extra 20GB which gives me 36GB total storage for all my Google activities. My oldest message in one of my oldest accounts (I have several) is dated July 2006 (older messages were deleted) and reminds me that I bought a Nokia E70 cell phone (mobile) – which was state-of-the-art at the time. Ah, such memories. All sitting there for over 8 years! An even older email account goes back to 2001.

So, let’s take a look at five good reasons for using Gmail – or you can use it’s full name of Googlemail if you prefer – both work eg joeblogs@gmail.com is inter changeable with joeblogs@googlemail.com.

1. Deliverability. By this I mean your messages getting out to people and also you getting theirs. As with all email systems, you still need to frequently check your spam box for ‘false-positives’, but most e-newsletters will accept Gmail accounts without question, whereas Hotmail, Yahoo and especially AOL may be banned from most simply because they all bounce too many messages. This was happening 10 years ago too, when I ran a company newsletter – we had to stop people signing up with AOL accounts.

2. Collect messages from any number of your other accounts and have them all come into one. Use a filter on the other ones – which can be your own domain, another free account or other Gmail accounts. Have them all come into one central email reader. Gmail let’s you set it up so that when you reply it says it’s from the same account the sender wrote to. Very clever and saves a lots of time!

3. Labels are folders, but all in one place. When you want to keep messages of a certain subject, or from a certain person or company, all in one place, you used to have to set up folders and filters. Then go through each folder to read them. Well, Gmail is a bit more clever. You can set up a label on an open message, then set up a filter for other messages to have that label as well. In your main inbox and All Mail box you will see the label at the top of the message, but you can also go directly to the folder of the same name to see them all. If you want to remove a message from that folder, just remove the label. I find this works very well if there are several members of staff who need to see a particular message, or it has information or questions which need answering by more than one of us. Add a label for each person. They see all their messages in one folder and when they have done their bit, they simply delete their label. Simple.

4. Inexpensive storage space. $5 for 20GB of extra storage space is brilliant. No need to worry about running out of room. The downside is that we all tend to forget to delete messages! My 63000+ can probably be cut down to several thousand if I took the time to go through them all. But it’s quite an historic record of my activities, so I think I’ll keep them there!

5. Integration with your Smartphone/cell phone. To get the most benefit on your Android device, you need to Register with a Gmail/Google account. This has several benefits. Firstly, it’s a continuous backup for your contacts – so no need to worry about transferring them all when you change phones. Register with Google Wallet and you can instantly by app upgrades without too much fuss. It’s great for looking after important documents, photos, music e-books too. In fact, the whole Google experience is a whole book in itself – and not the purpose of this blog post.

There are lots of things which having a Google account can do for you, but eMail is probably the first thing which comes to mind.

There have been reports of Google suddenly closing down accounts without warning. No idea why, but it happens from time to time. I use an email client (Thunderbird) on my pc and all my messages come down to that – as well as on my mobile. It’s a form of backup, so I shouldn’t lose everything if there is a hiccup but it’s also because I work in different ways depending what piece of equipment I’m using.

I’ll be looking at other aspects of email in my next post, but for now, let’s just say that I’m very happy with my 10 Gmail accounts and can’t imagine life without them.

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to do a series of mini posts to help people with their use of email. I don’t mean setting up or technical stuff, but rather the best way to use it as a tool – especially if you work in a non-tech environment, but don’t really know anything about how to use it.

Oh well, I know what I mean, so let’s see how it goes – just want to sort out this page and I’ll be back as soon as I can.